In a rare interview with the Russian news media this week, the anticorruption blogger Aleksei A. Navalny antagonized some of his fellow liberals by appearing to rule out the return of the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine.

Asked by the editor of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Aleksei Venediktov, if he agreed with the popular nationalist slogan, “Crimea Is Ours!” Mr. Navalny hedged. “Crimea belongs to the people who live in Crimea,” he said, according to a translation from The Interpreter, a website financed by the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s foundation.

“I think that despite the fact that the Crimea was seized with outrageous violations of all international norms, nevertheless, the realities are such that Crimea is now part of the Russian Federation,” Mr. Navalny added. “So let’s not kid ourselves. And I advise the Ukrainians not to kid themselves, either. It will remain part of Russia and will never become part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future.”

Pressed on whether he would try to return Crimea to Ukraine in the event he became Russia’s president, Mr. Navalny, who finished a strong second in the race for Moscow’s mayor last year, asked rhetorically, “What, is the Crimea a ham sandwich or something that you can take and give it back?”

He answered: “No, I don’t believe so.”

The sandwich quip was quickly quoted and, to some extent, distorted by Russian and Ukrainian bloggers, activists and journalists who responded without reference to the rest of the more nuanced interview.

Russia shocked by @navalny: TT @KSHN: If he upholds theft of Crimea,then how can he fight corruption and how's he better than Putin#Ukraine

Mr. Navalny, who has been under house arrest and banned from using the Internet or telephone since Feb. 28, the day Russian forces deployed across Crimea, had his wife, tweeting on his behalf, draw the attention of his 750,000 Twitter followers to the text of the interview, which, he said, his critics seemed not to have read in full.

According to the translation for The Interpreter by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, moments after his joke about the sandwich, Mr. Navalny suggested that Ukraine might be better off without Crimea’s conservative, pro-Russian population, which might have undermined what he termed, “in the purest form an anticorruption revolution.”

From the perspective of policy and restoration of justice, what must be done now in the Crimea is to conduct a normal referendum. Not like what they had, but a normal one. And how people will decide, that’s how it will be. I think we all can guess approximately what the results of that referendum could be. They will decide as they decide. I think that in fact, for Ukraine, despite the hurt they feel and so on, this is a plus. It is a great fortune that Crimea, with its absolutely pro-Russian people, with its conservatively-minded population which does not accept their anti-corruption revolution, which does not accept the desire to go into Europe, has left them. It has lost 2 million voters who would have put the breaks on that movement. Therefore, it is, on the one hand a winning situation.

It was the revolt in Ukraine, a country with close ties to Russia, that so distrubed President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Navalny added. “For Putin, this is terrible: rebellious masses chased out the crooks. And he wants to say that after that, there will be civil war and everything will collapse. Because for Russia, for the Russian population, this would provide a very, very bad example.”

Before the uproar over his remarks this week, Mr. Navalny seemed to have impeccable credentials as an opponent of what he called the “imperialist annexation” in a New York Times Op-Ed from March in which he called for sanctions against Mr. Putin’s inner circle.

Mr. Navalny, whose flirtation with Russian nationalists has been used by the Kremlin to portray him as a dangerous extremist, also wrote in the Times Op-Ed “that the consensus in both Russia and Crimea is that the peninsula has historically been closer to Moscow than to Kiev.” Still, he argued, “the notion that this reunification should be achieved at the end of the barrel of a gun is supported only by Mr. Putin’s hard-core base.”

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